It
was, by Harvard’s standards, a star-studded gathering. More than 300
participants convened from all Harvard’s faculties; they were, for the most
part, senior professors and deans—plus invited panelists with special expertise
in the field. The day’s panels consistently operated at a high intellectual
level, with audience participants asking questions that indicated long
involvement with the issues under review. There were also distant participants
who took part via live streaming. Throughout the day, an array of about two dozen displays highlighted options available at museums, libraries, and teaching and learning centers in different part of the University. The registration packet even had some digital swag: a USB flash drive preloaded with a variety of teaching and learning resources at Harvard.

President
Drew Faust welcomed everyone with remarks that accented the connection between
“thinking and making.” In this she tapped into a theme of later discussions:
the way that learning deepens when students have hands-on experiences with the
material studied. Faust mentioned one such example, the involvement of Harvard
Kennedy School students with the neighboring city of Somerville, in a venture of
mutual learning and contribution focused on governing an urban municipality.

Director
of institutional research Erin Driver-Linn, a central figure in organizing the symposium,
gave an overview of HILT’s operating
process, sketching out a cyclical model of testing innovations (engage —> experiment —> evaluate —> extend —> engage). She noted
that the first year of Hauser support would launch many pilot studies across
the University, and that HILT had already received 255 letters of intent to
apply for grants. (Proposals will be winnowed by a faculty panel, with those
selected for further development and possible funding announced in early spring.) She quoted the late historian of science Thomas Kuhn ’44, Ph.D. ’49, JF ’51, to
the effect that there is never a genuine paradigm shift until there is enough
consensus on what the new paradigm is.

The Science of Learning

Cabot professor of social
ethics Mahzarin Banaji was facilitator for the day’s first panel, on “The
Science of Learning.” She noted that while mother birds appear to “teach” their
young to find worms, psychologists have asserted that humans have “a
specialized capacity to extract generalized knowledge from the behavior of
others.” But many things we believe about learning simply aren’t so, she added.
There is, for example, a broadly held belief that individuals have different
ways of learning: that there are visual learners, auditory learners, those who
learn from images, and so on; hence, educators are advised to match teaching
methods to each person’s characteristic learning style. But there is no research supporting the idea that such matching influences
learning outcomes.

Nobel laureate Carl Wieman, a pioneer in effective
science education and associate director of science at the White House
Office of Science and Technology Policy, noted that although much is known
(from cognitive psychology, brain science, and college classroom studies) about
thinking and learning, this knowledge is almost never applied to teaching
techniques. “Abstract ideas are not
enough,” he said, drawing a parallel to bridge-building, where understanding
the relevant principles of physics will not get a bridge built. Wieman cited a
few well-established results from research:

trying to teach anything to someone whose
attention is divided will impair learning;

covering a topic, testing, then considering the
job done may not result in retention of what was learned; and

telling something to listeners who do not
process the information in some way will not create long-lasting knowledge.

Roddy Roediger, McDonnell Distinguished
University Professor at Washington University in St. Louis, described some
of his research on college students, whom he called “the Drosophilia of my field.” He observed that students report their
study habits as stressing “reading the textbook, highlighting, and
underlining.” However, Roediger said, “You learn a lot more from exams than
from reading material.” Neither professors nor students like tests, but research
shows that frequent assessments outpace more study time as a way to retain
information. One study even showed that “the more you study, the less you
learn.” Roediger asserted that “You need
to practice retrieval—there’s a huge
benefit in doing this.”

Johnstone Family
professor of psychology Steven Pinker spoke on writing. After paying due
respects to The Elements of Style,
the classic writing primer by William Strunk Jr. and E.B. White, Pinker cited several criticisms
of the book and noted that “it should not
be the basis for writing instruction in the twenty-first century.”

Pinker told of a
psychology experiment with three-year-old children. A child came into a room and received an
M&M candy box, but opened the box to find pencils inside. When asked what another three-year-old who
got his own M&M box would expect to find inside, the child answers,
“Pencils.” Pinker used this example to elucidate “the chief contributor to
opaque writing: it is hard to know what it is like for someone not to know what you know.” He went on
to say that a writer has to “anticipate and minimize the reader’s memory load.”

In the question
session, he compared memories to websites: “They need links to be accessible.”

Clark
professor of business administration Clay Christensen opened with a
question: “Why is success so hard to sustain?” His provisional answer, that
“the reason companies cannot sustain success is that they follow the principles
of good management that we teach at Harvard Business School,” triggered uproarious laughter. In industry after
industry, he pointed out, established, successful companies like General Motors get dethroned
by “someone who comes in at the bottom of the market with a simple, affordable
product that people can afford, and then they move up.” He noted that Toyota, for example, began not
with the Lexus, but the Corona.

There are exceptions, like hotels. Holiday
Inn never became a more upmarket brand after its low-end entry; neither did
McDonald’s. There needs to be “something about the business model or technology
that is extendable upward,” Christensen said. For a long while, that also seemed to be the case in higher education.
But given the power of the online world and its teaching modules, “now, higher
education has a technological core, and so it is now disruptible” by low-end
competition. (Read
Christensen’s recent Harvard Magazine
essay on disruptive change in higher
education.) He told how the online University of Phoenix could show his
lectures to 135,000 M.B.A. students, and was “spending $200 million per year to
make teaching better.”

Cathy
Davidson, Franklin Humanities Institute professor of interdisciplinary studies
at Duke, started by explaining that “disruptive things happen as
reactions to the status quo, but we don’t see
the status quo—it’s like the air we breathe.” Consequently we are “doing a fine
job of training students for the twentieth century.” Davidson explained that
the research university was designed to solve the problems of the Industrial
Age and had its basis in the structure of disciplinary specialists teaching
cleanly divided subjects. But in the twenty-first century, even the high-level distinctions
among natural and social sciences and humanities “make very little sense. It
takes disruption to break through those silos.” Returning to the theme of high technology, she declared, “If we can be
replaced by a computer screen, we should be.”

In the discussion period, Christensen
observed that during his 20-year career at HBS, “The intensity
of curiosity [among students] is down. They don’t know how injection molding is done, and they
don’t care.” He predicted, “We’ll see a bifurcation of research and
teaching, and we’ll need fewer teachers over time.” The online future of
teaching “will be a great thing,” he said. “We’ll commoditize teaching at HBS.”

Davidson praised the online teaching of the nonprofit Khan Academy, established by Salman Khan, M.B.A. ’03, a place “doing back-end
research on how people learn.” Balkanski
professor of physics and applied physics Eric Mazur responded from the
audience that the Khan Academy approach, like “99 percent of the use of
technology in education,” is essentially “old wine in new bottles,” as it uses
the classic lecture technique of one-way transmission of information. Referring
to earlier colloquies, Mazur said he was not so much interested in “scaling up
the number of people who learn” as in being able to “produce better learning.” (See further discussion by Mazur
below and in “Twilight of
the Lecture,” on his approach to active learning.)

Christensen said
that “a student’s job is to feel successful. And school doesn’t help most
students feel successful.” He mentioned seeing three teenaged girls walking
together on the sidewalk, all of them texting other people. “For my generation,
that is so rude,” he said. “But you
can’t count out the idea that this generation might prefer the online experience.”

Davidson noted
that enrollment rates at the online University of Phoenix “dropped dramatically
last year,” and wondered if some disillusionment with online learning was
setting in.

Mazur capped the
session with a talk on his practice of peer instruction, giving the audience an
experience of it after posing a physics question that evoked three different
answers from the academic crowd in the room, and asking participants to discuss
the reasons for their choices with each other. “You can’t sleep through my class
because your neighbor will start talking to you,” he declared. Mazur opined
that students do not pay close attention in lectures, think that they know the
material after having heard it, and are not confronted with their
misconceptions—generating a false sense of security. He related one complaint
he often hears about peer instruction from students: “Professor Mazur is not
teaching us anything—we have to learn it all ourselves.” He also said, “Our approach to testing only rewards
perfection—but the road to innovation is littered with mistakes.”

The Continuing Importance of
Presence

The final symposium was “Looking to
the Future: An Interactive Discussion with Attendees.” Provost Alan Garber
facilitated, opening by declaring that “Experimentation is something we’d like
to see much more of at Harvard.” He argued for separating innovation from the
evaluation of its effects, as “innovators do not always make good evaluators.”
Garber cited Charles William Eliot, Harvard’s president from 1869 to 1909, on the importance of building
character in students, and declared that this goal remains in place today:
“Think of how we feel about what our students do later on in life.” (Though he added, “I
can’t think of what metrics we use for character.”)

Former Tufts
University president Lawrence Bacow, now a member of the Harvard Corporation,
cited a faculty proverb: “We all teach for free but we get paid to grade.” He
speculated that innovation in learning will eventually mean that “we will be
released from the tedium that comes with grading.” He also cautioned that “any program looks good if
you only look at its benefits and not its costs. All ways of improving the
teaching/learning environment will only add costs to our system. That can’t go
on forever. These things come to an end and usually it’s not pretty.” The
answer, Bacow suggested, is “to improve productivity—or we will lose the
support we have received, historically, from the public and the government.”

Bass professor
of government Michael Sandel, after musing that “we might all go the way of
the Hummer,” asked, “What is the importance of presence of teacher to student, and of students to each other?” He
also wanted to know to what extent the Internet recasts the question of
presence.

The Internet makes
possible certain types of global classroom; a video of one version of Sandel’s “Justice” course
showed students from China, Japan, and Harvard addressing the same moral
questions, with contrasting opinions on them. But given audio and video lag time,
“videoconferencing won’t work that well” as a way to realize global classrooms,
Sandel said. “Actual physical presence
matters a lot. You have to enable students to see each other.” There is also
the camaraderie students have with each other; after the three-nation course,
students volunteered to keep up with each other on Facebook, until they
realized that the Chinese didn’t have
Facebook.

Online technology also, obviously, could
greatly expand course enrollments. But, as Sandel asked, “If we were to put
this out free for everyone in the world, students might say, ‘What about the
fact that we paid $50,000 a year to do this?’” In the discussion session, Bacow
followed up by noting, “Our capacity to reach others becomes inhibited as our
unit price continues to grow.”

In the discussion,
Mazur raised the question of how to get the faculty as a whole to innovate in
its teaching practices. Garber had one answer: “When people see success, they
want to emulate it. The challenge to the innovators in the room is how to be
evangelists among your colleagues. We will support you in the central
administration. But you know how easy it is to push faculty to do things they
don’t want to do.”